


Losing My Religion

by AleiaJade



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-05
Updated: 2013-12-31
Packaged: 2017-12-17 17:36:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/870164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AleiaJade/pseuds/AleiaJade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Waiting grows old.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. i.

She’s just finishing the 'd' when the teacher appears over her shoulder. “I can’t read this, Amy.” Miss Francine takes the name card from little girl’s desk. “Please start again, neatly this time."

“Amelia.” Across the room, Mels folds her arms and speaks for her friend. “Her name is Amelia.”

The little girl sends a smile to the Time-Away corner, where Mels has already managed to wind up on the first day of the year, then begins to pick through her pencil box for the bluest crayon to reprint Amelia Pond across the paper. She adds a princess with flowing red hair and red galoshes to one side and a floppy-haired prince with a tie to the other. “Amelia Pond is a fairytale name,” she whispers.

\-- -- --

When Rory’s mother has them over for biscuits and telly the last day of school, she introduces herself as “Rory’s friend, Amy Pond” and doesn’t know why. Rory asks if he can call her Amy anyway, and she decides he may. She still doesn’t know why.

\-- -- --

Leadworth Secondary is right next door to Leadworth Primary, but she decides to reinvent herself for the move across the parking lot. She buys herself some Converse, picks out notebooks covered with boy bands instead of spaceships, and uses an orange marker to scrawl “AMY POND” across them. No one notices but Rory.

Rory offers her a galaxy bedecked pencil he just happened to find in the hallway one day. She wears it to a nub, and he offers her another that just happened to turn up in his locker.

\-- -- --

In the ninth grade, she enters Dr. Brown’s office for the first and last time. He greets her with a “Hello, Miss Amelia” as she sits down and he leaves early that day with a dripping suit and a dying goldfish in his pocket, the glass bowl still overturned on his now-ruined case file.

Mels positively glows with pride.

\-- -- --

Her rugby-star boyfriend remembers their one-month anniversary with chocolates and a poem of his own laboured composition. The last couplet runs  
 _Of you my heart grows ever fond,  
My only, lovely Amelia Pond._

She tears the pink paper up and wads it back into his hands, crying. “I’m Amy, Amy Pond. Nobody calls me Amelia.”

They break up.

\-- -- --

She still draws. The girl who covered the walls in crayon portraits of a raggedy doctor and his box has moved on to pencils and pastels and the occasional watercolor, but her favorite color is still the bluest blue and her favorite subject a man with a tattered shirt and swirling tie. She signs these pieces Pond, Amelia and adds the date for flourish.

Amy Pond lives in Leadworth. Amelia Pond doesn’t, and hasn’t for a long time. But she’s waiting, and if that stupid noise ever comes back, so will she.


	2. ii.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Goes AU somepoint during season 6.

The Doctor is alive, and Amelia Pond waits for him in the great big house with Rory. Modelling is fun, and then it’s dull, so she bottles the rain, but she gets it all wrong and the scent stagnates. It’s enticing and fresh, _dewy_ , but they can only sell the formula in small bottles--the chemicals decay quickly and the perfume takes on a deep, pervading melancholy.

****

Rory lives passionately as ever, scrambling eggs for her mornings, bringing a tray upstairs when the bed swallows her up like sand as the waves roll out. Thursdays he goes to tea with his mother, bikes down to Lower Leadworth and returns with hot cookies and fresh bread and once an entire shepherd’s pie they put in the freezer, in case of company that never comes.

****

The smell of rain fills the house. It starts benignly, one of several perfume bottles on the dresser, spritzed into her drawers of underthings. Next, she’s dabbing the scent on before she leaves for errands, then nestling a soaked-and-dried handkerchief in her sleeve. She begins tucking a bottle into her waistband to carry about the house.

****

Rory keeps the windows open and wishes the Doctor would come back, misses his Amy.

****

One day he comes home to find her on the couch, drenched. The wall is soaked, the carpet sprouts broken glass, Petrichor puddles the living room. The house reeks. Amy reeks. It all reeks of longing, of waiting.

****

They have to do something, go somewhere. Take action, be agents, leave. They pack the house that night. Rory wraps the china in newspaper while Amy showers. When he creeps upstairs for the lamps, he finds her in her knickers tossing jumpers and tights, jeans and skirts and khaki shorts into any and all of the suitcases and hampers strewn about the room. She turns when he notices him and there’s a blue flame burning in her eyes. “Just our stuff,” she says. “Nothing else. Nothing we didn’t have to start with.”

****

Rory picks up a jewelry box. “This was my mum’s. Passed down from my great-grandmum, always to the daughters at their wedding.” A sheepish grin spreads. “And to me. I thought about giving it to Mels, you know, before. It just seemed right.”

****

The flame blazes up, and there’s Amy again. “He. Left. Her.” The fire burns her black and cold and calm, so calm. “He left her. Left us. Left _me_.”

****

They’re gone by first light. And so is Amelia Pond, who waits no more.


End file.
